Thanks for this Leonie, it's much appreciated. If I may ask - was there anything in particular that Donald Lambie said that stood out for you as being meaningful/convincing? It seems the SOP in Australia has followed a similar 'mellowing'/'publicly acceptable' method of presenting itself to prospect...

Yes, this is a real pity Daffy. For what it's worth, I think you've done a fine job. Does this mean that everything we have written will disappear permanently? It would be a pity if all that went to waste. Again, it's very unfortunate that you've decided to do this Daffy - is it not possible to hand...

I'd be grateful if Dr. Alan were allowed the opportunity to un-delete his posts. Also, on the "other people are interested in the dialogue" point - whenever the two of us start a dialogue on a thread the number of 'views' goes up very quickly - I think people are interested, and I don't th...

I think the main point is that you get situations like this, where Dr. Alan and I have a rather involved discussion within a thread, and then at his whim he just effectively deletes all his posts. This breaks the thread (figuratively and literally) and the whole thing is evidence of very bad faith o...

Dr. Alan, 1. "Your reticence in this regard is at once perplexing and slightly amusing" - this was merely my impression, it's obviously not "personal abuse" 2. "Does it not occur to you that 'reasoning with the teenager' is exactly what I'm trying to do here?" - this wa...

Dear Dr. Alan, We always seem to get to this point - namely where I try to reason with you on the issues (that you yourself raise in fact) and you attempt to avoid them all by calling reason itself into question. (It may disappoint you to know that this move is itself an argument within 'Reason'). T...

Dear Dr. Alan, There seem to be three main issues here: 1. Whether or not we live in a 'dream' which is fundamentally unreal; and 2. Whether sense experience (or experience based on sense impressions) completely covers the scope of our experience. 3. If we can indeed have experiences which are not b...

Dr. Alan, That's just a cheap trick and you know it. I could've said at the end of my reply that: "of course, Dr. Alan will just respond with cheap tricks because he's more interested in appearing superior than he is in engaging with the issues at hand" but I didn't, because it's not my in...

Weapon analogy: I actually think this is quite an apt analogy. Towards the end of my time in School this was very much the impression I got - none of the tutors really knew what they were doing or what Vedanta actually said about various issues. I suppose the other thing to note is that weapons of t...

ManOnTheStreet wrote: The difference between that and brainwashing is that brainwashing prevents you from thinking critically or reasoning effectively about the thing you're being taught. If someone teaches you to think: "don't question my authority", they're setting you up to accept abso...

Essentially yes. It wasn't so much "free your mind of thought" as it was "fill your mind with these thoughts". The idea of teaching people to think in a different way is actually not the problem. This happens all the time at primary/high school, university, and in many employment...

Thank you Justice for the information. It will be interesting to see if the same sort of results can be obtained with a larger sample size. Dr. Alan, At the risk of promulgating a somewhat tangential post, there are two main questions regarding what you said: 1. The cogency of your entire post relie...